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You realized your timeline was doomed nearly four months ago. Any timeline where John and Jade are dead is automatically doomed by your definition. Shit like that cannot be allowed to go on. You've gotta be firm, lay down the law, cross that line in the sand and say sorry but no, not here, not now, not on your watch, they live.
It took a little bit longer to realize your timeline was doomed in a more technical sense as well. You're still not clear on who or what makes that decision and you don't want to stop moving long enough for Rose's explanations to start making sense. Paradox space, how does it even work? Who the fuck cares.
But the thing is, time travel only comes in two flavors: stable loops and hard resets that kill the messenger. You don't remember yourself coming back from the future to stop John from being a dumbass, save Jade, and incidentally prototype something less brain-clawingly upfucked than Lil' Cal as your sprite. That means when you go back to do that, you're going to bite the big one in short order.
No way to tell how ahead of time. Most of the dead Daves you've seen were either dead when you ran across them -- came back to do something too ironic for this game to handle so it edited them out -- or were dying when they came back to warn you of imminent shenanigans and at least one surefire way not to get that coveted gold star for sterling gameplay. But three came back in good working order and then just... died. One fell off your house into the magma. Your balance is too good to slip like that. One got knocked out by a freaking rust imp and ground up between two gears. Like an imp could touch you in its wildest dreams. And one -- the last one -- took off his shades, gave you a look you still can't figure out, and said he'd go haul John's ass back from his Denizen's lair, might as well die doing something that mattered instead of kicking it like a chump.
(He did it, too. You got two corpses for the price of one. His/yours is gone, tossed into the magma with the rest of the trash. John's is floating in an oversized fishtank in your house, hacked up by his Denizen and kind of ragged from decomposition before you got him into preservatives, but there nonetheless. You wish you had Jade stashed away safe too, but she never even made it into the medium.)
You got better at timeline management pretty damn quick after that.
And now you're going to throw all that away and commit suicide. Yeah, it's not like you'll stop existing, at least in the sense that past you is as much Dave Strider as current you, and he'll just pick up from where you supplex time and head off in a less doomed direction. But he won't remember these four months. He won't have to live with your failures, with your friends' deaths, with Rose's slow slide into frozen rage and despair that you have no idea how to fix. (Undoing is easy. Fixing's an entirely different heap of smuppets.)
You can write yourself a note. Some dead Daves have done that for you, with varying levels of irony and usefulness. But there's no way to put four months into a note, or even a letter. Maybe a string of SBAHJ strips, but that lacks the requisite fine detail. You want to take every second of your timeline and catch it in a jar for past you to examine from every angle until he understands -- blood-deep, bone-sharp -- exactly how much it hurts to survive when Jade and John are dead. You want to photograph Rose falling inward like a black hole, pulling your last thread of human contact in after herself, so past you knows how fragile she really is -- she's razors and brilliance and motherfucking diamond, but hit the right angle and she shatters like glass. (Gets more dangerous, too.)
No. You have to go back, and you have to live.
There's only one path that has half a chance of working.
It's like suicide twice over, rancid icing on the rotten cake of paradox space's Victorian moral panic about having more than one version of someone with swag as awesome as yours running around without having to become each other via loops, but fuck that. If this is what it takes to save everyone, then this is what it takes. You'll pay in a heartbeat. What else is a knight even for?
And hey, past you gets a sprite that won't make him want to flog himself raw with his own brainstem. Bonus.
You quit pestering Rose and give her fifteen minutes to force herself to sleep. She's been spending way too much time talking to the interdimensional squid gods. She knows tricks like that these days.
You spin back to your apartment, shove everything past you might need into your sylladex, and take a moment to look at John drifting in his fishtank, a shitty webcam photo of Jade taped to the clear glass wall. "Hang tight, guys. I got this," you promise them.
Showtime.
---------------
You and past you convince Egbert not to listen to the troll, and that's it, curtains fall, thanks for the applause ladies and gents. Time to drop the mike, leave the stage, face the big bad world beyond the club walls.
You are so far from ready, it's like the word is written in alien pictograms on the far side of the galaxy and also, you're dyslexic. And blind. But what the fuck else can you do?
You unload your sylladex, stacking all your gear and your random shit and your bits of frozen time in two neat piles on the roof of your apartment for past you to inherit. Sprites don't come with sylladexes installed, after all, and you're not going to use yourself as an experiment to see if a pre-existing one would survive the conversion.
Past you raises one eyebrow a millimeter, clearly wanting to ask what madness this is and if it's contagious. Not surprising; he doesn't know word two about time travel yet. (Word one is, hey, time travel is a thing that exists, who knew? Which is pretty fucking obvious, after he watched you jump into the alpha right in front of him.) You don't dare stop to explain. He might get the idea on his own if you up and die before he chucks that nightmare puppet into the brainless feathery asshole, but given where you are and how that first doomed Dave did an unironic swandive into the lava, you're not taking any chances that your corpse would be usable that way.
If you want something done, you do it yourself. Bro taught you that.
You take a breath, let it out, and flip up and back toward the unfinished sprite. Your ass makes first contact, like sinking into a bowl of electrified jello, and for a bare second you stare down at past you and think, this had better be fucking worth it, and then the world goes orange and despite yourself you slam your eyes shut and--
Fuck.
Fuck.
The game is fighting itself, trying to kill you and change you all at once, conflicting directives yanking you apart, and you can feel. every. goddamn. nanosecond. Die/live, die/live, die/live, drumbeat like a heartbeat, boneshake like an earthquake ripping through your brain, and you reach out with the fingers you don't have (they don't shake), grab hold of the code that hisses around you like a blender full of rattlesnakes, and you jam the lines with a future straight into your heart and gut and eyes. As you start to change, the deletion protocol stops recognizing you and fucks off to writhe around past you, lying in wait to kill any other selves who step out of line.
Get with the program or die.
And you are with the program. You are so with the program. You are the program.
You're also a fucking brainless asshole crow with a sword through its heart.
And you're Dave Strider.
All at once.
The program reconciles faster than even you can follow and you coalesce out of orange infinity, still surrounded by that endless mind-searing flash of light, hiding you from past you's prying eyes. One last instant, too brief to follow for anyone who isn't both a game construct and a hero of Time, and then wings rip from your back, muscles reshaping around your ribcage to support them even though they're not what powers your flight. Code rushes like blood through new arteries and veins, radioactive yellow flowing under neon orange like that gel pen collection Bro went nuts with two years ago, doodling robots and horses all over the bathroom walls.
Your legs slam together and your toes point down, stretching and pressing and bending and shit, this angle is impossible your knees should be broken where are your knees. Fuck that, where are your pants?
Suddenly you have feathers on your shoulders and around your neck. They itch where they ruck up over the edge of your shirt. At least you still have your shirt. No Strider-chest will be exposed to the world, not like Strider... tail. Apparently. Right, sprites are like giant floating worms with random torsos attached. When they're not giant floating smuppet abominations. If you turn into a smuppet you will find Bro and kick his ass. Somehow. You will make it happen by sheer force of outraged will.
The itch is fading, the feathers melting into fabric (or the other way around), like your shirt is turning into part of your body. Heart on your sleeve's gonna take on a whole new meaning. Just a fabric wound, ma'am, nothing to worry about, we'll amputate the side seam and he'll be fresh as a fucking aerosol body spray.
You have just enough time to hope that's the end of the changes before something gathers in your chest like a tumor, the hard knot of all the shit you've been trapping behind your teeth for months rather than pour your pathetic whining out into Rose's ears turned physical and solid, sharp and writhing and slicing its way to freedom, alien toothmonster bursting out to eat you alive and... grow a hilt.
Fuck. The sword. You can feel the sword.
If you pull it out, it won't bleed, but right now your blood code blood is gushing through it, keeping it alive, tying it inseparably to the rest of you. If you draw it, you think it might anchor to your hand, tiny rootlets of code burrowing from the not-leather of the grip into your palm and merging with what passes for tendons. (It's mostly your own imagination, mind imposing structure on amorphous glop -- the prototyping only cares about powers and outward shape, not inward architecture -- but you shove that little game FAQ down and decide to forget it.) The edge is impossibly sharp, ridiculously strong, as hard to destroy as anything the game decides is important.
You guess that means you're that hard to destroy. (Within the game.) And you're different enough from past you that you've sidestepped the death-o-matic revolving doorway. (For now.)
At least you kept your shades. You can feel them too, like your shirt and the sword, information passing from the code mimicking your skin to the code mimicking metal and plastic. It's fucking creepy if you stop to think about it. So you don't.
You have so much else to think about. It's a thinking waterfall up in your brain, all these game secrets you and Rose busted ass to figure out piece by toe-munching piece just pouring through clean and clear and unencrypted like it ain't no thing. You had to come back. You can see that now. But first John and Jade had to die, because otherwise you wouldn't have come back, past you wouldn't have you as a sprite, Rose wouldn't have merged her dream self with her past dream self, and your game session would've gone off the rails, into the canyon, and down the fucking river out to sea instead of leading to whatever catastrophe has the trolls so ticked that they're willing to kill you through the internet for shits and giggles.
Speaking of which, you need to talk to that gallowsCallibrator troll chick and rub her leet-speaking nose in temporal mechanics and causality chains. This is basic fucking logic, and anyone who can lead Egderp by the nose so neatly ought to be smarter than that.
You realize you're still thinking at computer speed, and make a conscious effort to synch yourself up to meatspace time.
"Hey," past you finishes saying.
You bob your head, instinctively counterbalancing the slight rise and fall of your float. Okay, that's a trace of crow bullshit you'll have to keep a sniper's eye on, ready to shoot it dead if it gets out without any ironic justification.
"Sup," you say, matching past Dave's -- or just Dave's, you're his sprite now, must make you Davesprite -- dry inflection.
Gotta get through the formalities.
Then you can go off and dive under the magma (it won't hurt; you know it won't hurt; nothing but players and a few special NPCs can touch you anymore), let the liquid stone wrap you up like the Texas heat waves you'll never feel again, and... and... fuck.
You're not you anymore.
Maybe it won't count if you cry. Just this once. Where no one can see, and the magma burns your tears and eats your screams and fills your blood with righteous scalding red instead of this cheap imitation piss and citrus. Where you hammer it home that you're not human, you're not a hero, you're just circuits and goop and code that remembers being Dave Strider and still aches to save his (your) friends even though you know with cold orange game logic that they'll have to die again to win.
After that, it's none of anybody's goddamn business what you do.
Show's over here, everyone getting up from their seats and moving on to a new and more exciting thing on the next stage over. But you've got time for an encore before you go. You curl your tail corkscrew tight, flex your wings, and reach through the game code, out past the boundary of this session into another instance of paradox space, to troll GC.
Showtime.